The Missing Picture

Director Rithy Panh won the Un Certain Regard prize at last year's Cannes for this startlingly original work, which uses handmade clay figurines and detailed dioramas to recount the suffering of Panh's family at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime following the communist victory in Cambodia in 1975. Cambodian-born director Rithy Panh has spent the last two decades chronicling the ravages visited upon his country by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime in such essential films as S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. With The Missing Picture, Panh offers his most autobiographical and eerily beautiful film on the subject to date, exploring the suffering his own family endured after the Khmer Rouge entered Panh's hometown of Phnom Penh through a novel, and daring, artistic strategy: as all extant visual material from the period is sheer Khmer Rouge propaganda, Panh visualizes the events through the use of handmade clay figurines and detailed dioramas. Provocative, painful, and ultimately transcendent, The Missing Picture transforms Panh's search for a seemingly irrecoverable past into both an artistic and a historical triumph. 2014 Academy Award® Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film